From "Reading Anna Karenina" by James Hynes: You don’t need to know a thing about Tolstoy’s biography to understand that he was a profoundly sensual man who at the same time yearned to reject the material world and be spiritually pure; this struggle is indelibly etched on every page of... Continue reading

Oblonsky - Philandering (one hopes and trusts!) = Madisox. What a magnificent portrait of the healthy, high-spirited, professionally competent but existentially simple and childish man of wealth and ease. The way he impresses everyone as younger, more vigorous than his wife, that irrepresible smile that's always coming on, his great... Continue reading

If we exclude one medieval masterpiece, the beautifully commodious thing about Russian prose is that it is all contained in the amphora of one round century—with an additional little cream jug provided for whatever surplus may have accumulated since. One century, the nineteenth, had been sufficient for a country with... Continue reading

It is noted throughout these essays that the origination of writing began with "accountancy". An expert on early Sumarian tables states "writing developed as a direct consequence of the compelling demands of an expanding economy". The early forms of writing were depicted as pictures or symbols, ...

Kaitlin:
You do a fine job in paragraph one of setting up some of the important issues/questions that Ong addressses in his essay. You quote his key question “How does it get together organized material for recall?” But then you drop it. Why? Since you've identified it as a key question, why not follow up and explain how Ong attempts to answer the question and what you learned from his answer?

One important point that is made my Walter Ong in the essay “Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media” is when he mentions how oral culture is linked to communication. Ong makes an interesting point on page 51 in paragraph three. He mentions how a person in an oral culture has no text. Then he...

Ryan:
You make an excellent connection in your first paragraph between the lack of numeracy and the lack of literacy. I agree that both are very difficult to wrap our minds around. Ong spent his entire career trying to think this through carefully and to make writing-obsessed scholars think about what "primary orality" might have been like.
Your second paragraph raises some good questions. What does it mean to live in a culture of "literacy"? If a person is illiterate and can't read, don't texts exist, waiting to be read? I think Ong is thinking more in terms of entire cultures than individuals. He (like Burke) wants to think about how groups of people lived, remembered, passed information, etc. without writing. This becomes a big issue in the Medieval period where writing and reading did exist, but was limited to a church-trained elite, with most of the population still living in a world of "orality."
Ong is careful not to treat all this in an "all or nothing" way. He acknowledges all kind of interesting blends of orality and literacy, and at the end he even proposed what he calls "secondary orality"----a return to an oral/aural orientation in the world of electronic communication, where plenty of texts exist and most can read.

I think an important point in this article can be found in the first paragraph. Ong says “Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is lie, that is, a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even the possibility of writing.” As we’ve been...

Tiffany:
I agree with what you've written here, mostly because it's a paraphrase of what I said in class! I need you to try harder to engage the text in question. You need to respond to what Walter Ong wrote, not just what I said.
Isn't it interesting that this itself is an issue of "orality and literacy"???? You are more comfortable dealing with my oral presentation than the written one you were assigned. Why is that? I think if you read Ong a bit more carefully and really make an effort to get something out of its written words, you will see that he has some answers.

In Walter Ong's "Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media", he disscusses the difference between a world with written language and a world without. Back in the old days people memorized everything. The news would be sang in a sing song, rhyming sort of way in a small group. Very few people actually r...

Kelli:
Why do you think Ong takes so much time to contrast the visual from the auditory sense? What is he trying to do with this elaborately-worked out contrast? What implications does it have for his main topic of "orality" and "literacy"? Which, for instance, is more visually-oriented and which is more auditory-oriented?
This is one of those occasions where you probably need to go back and read the piece again, maybe with the article analysis handout nearby. You want to always be theorizing about what the author's purpose was in writing the essay. That's really the key to understanding it.

"Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual." (Walter Ong) This corresponds with what we have been talking about in class, because with the pictographs they represent what they describe whereas letters put together have no meaning, exc...

The establishment of today's alphabet makes life a little easier. It consists of 26 letters compared to the "pictographic" form was where you must learn a new picture or symbol for each new thing you find. It makes it hard because for every new item invented you must learn the new "picture" that...

Kelli:
Good summary. You should push a bit more here to go beyond just the summary, though. Try to pick a "juicy" quote from the original text and discuss its significance. Try to add something new or original to the discussion by making a connection, pointing out something we may have missed, etc.

The token system was a precursor to the invention of pictographic writing because, the tokens represented something that a person might get in return for example; If I owed someone then I would give them tokens that represent what I owed them and when I received the item to give to them I wo...

Eric:
This is an absolutely masterful response---grad school level, I would say. You have grasped most of Ong's most important points, demonstrated your understanding by summarizing and/or paraphrasing them in your own words, and connected them to the work of other writers we read this semester. Here is a great example:
"In this way, written language is much better. It allows us to put aside a thought, think around a problem, come back to the original thought and discover new ideas. Written language has made possible analytic thinking and deep problem solving. Ong would agree with Eric Havelock when he says that the Greek alphabet democratized literacy."

In his essay entitled "Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media", Walter Ong contrasts the worlds of oral only culture to those that include the written word. He does not seem to pick a favorite. Instead, he makes points to the perceived benefits of both types of existence. The written world has made...

I thought this related to our discussion and was interesting. Scientists are studying a certain breed of crows that are displaying cognitive skills previously thought to be only human. They even build and use tools. http://the-scientist.com/2012/09/18/crows-do-it-again/ http://news.science...

Eric:
This is another excellence response that demonstrates great insight into Langer's argument. You move with really admirable efficiency through the most important points---and you do so with your own spot-on summaries and paraphrases of Langer. That is not easy to do, but it really shows that you've grasped and mastered her most important points.
I found this passage, from your paragraph 3, to be particularly packed with meaning and very well put:
"It is the use of abstract thinking. Words alone are meaningless. Humans have the ability to see a word, decode its meaning, and then think about the meaning. We do this in a way that stimulates imagination related to the word. That is what makes language between humans so special. It allows us to evolve, to build, create, and advance as a race."

In "The Lord of Creation", Langer describes man's use of symbolism as the single most significant difference between humans and animals. Symbolism, according to Langer, is something that we have created as a race to bring up the meaning of an object. Symbols invoke thinking "about" something rat...